Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Notablecalls - Paperstand

The Wall Street Journal reports, citing ppl familiar with the matter, that Honda (HMC) is expected to announce Tue morning at a major air show in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, plans to crack America's small business jet mkt. It wasn't immediately clear whether Honda is going to unveil specific business plans for its 4-5 passenger twin-engine jet, the Honda Jet. But those individuals said the co will likely at least tout that it is ready to make the final push to realize its 20-year dream to become a jet aircraft maker by trying to obtain official certification of the aircraft by the FAA.

According to the CNET News Symantec (SYMC) and Yahoo (YHOO) on Tue plan to announce a partnership to help secure consumers online, according to public relations representatives for Yahoo. The arrangement between the two co's will include "some new security offerings" according to an e-mail sent to reporters by Yahoo's pr agency.

According to the Barron's Online, Morgan Stanley Investment Mgmt disclosed that it now owns about 9.5m class A shares of New York Times (NYT), or a 6.6% stake, after paying a total of $34.2m for 1.4m additional shares.

CNET News discusses SCO Group (SCOX) and IBM (IBM) court battle. A Utah judge dealt the SCO a significant blow in June by throwing out more than 180 of the co's specific allegations of IBM programmers moving proprietary Unix code to Linux, or otherwise misbehaving. When SCO fired back last week with a filing that seeks to reverse that decision, it salted its justification with a few instances of IBM actions that SCO believes show its case. SCO accuses IBM of intentionally destroying evidence. "Weeks after SCO filed its lawsuit, IBM directed 'dozens' of its Linux developers within its Linux Technology Center and at least ten of its Linux developers outside the LTC to delete the AIX and/or Dynix source code from their computers. One IBM Linux developer has admitted to destroying Dynix source code and tests, as well as pre-Mar'03 drafts of source code he had written for Linux while referring to Dynix code on his computer," SCO said in the filing.

Notablecalls: Expect to see some interest in SCO shares. I'm not a legal expert, but "destroying evidence" sounds bad for IBM.

The only interest in SCOX shares is to see what new bagholders the institutions holding this piece of crap can find. What does come out in the latest filing is that SCO dosn't claim ownership of the 180 trade secrets at issue. The claim that IBM's contract bizarrely prohibits IBM from disclosing it's own trade secrets. The spoliation accusation is really an attampt to disguise the real legal revelation in this filing -- SCO dosn't own the IP it is suing over.